We are excited to share you the November 2018 version of Power BI helper with many interesting features. With this version, you get the list of all pages and list of all bookmarks. You can find all bookmarks related to a page. You can also through this version find out the data columns that consume most of the space in the data model. We also added the ability to do update to the latest version through the application itself. Let’s check out these new features.
If you like to learn more about Power BI Helper, read this page.
If you are new to Power BI Helper, read below posts to learn what are existing features of this product:
- Version 0.1: Tables and Columns used in the visualization
- Version 0.2: Search a field or table in visualizations and filters
- Version 0.3: Measure dependency tree
- Version 1.0: Export entire M script
- Version 2.0: Connection Types, Multiple PBI files, Relationship advise, and Not used tables
- Version 3.0: Export Model documentation
- Version 4.0: Beautify M Script and Row Level Security Documentation
Download
To Download Power BI Helper, click here:
Download Power BI Helper from here.
Bookmarks and Pages
If you have multiple bookmarks saved from different states of a Power BI page, and you have many pages, and many bookmarks, there is no way to find out all bookmarks pointing to a specific page, unless checking them one by one.
This can be an important information to know, because you may want to update all bookmarks related to one page or do something with them. We implemented a feature in Power BI Helper that gives you the full list of all pages and all bookmarks. This is in the Bookmarks
If you select a page, then all bookmarks will be filtered to show only those that are pointing to that page.
Find Bookmarks that belong to the selected page
Or if you select a bookmark, you can see which page the bookmark is pointing to
Column Sizes: Performance Tuning Guide
Doing the proper modeling is always a challenge in Power BI, especially when you are working on a model for a while. One of the aspects of modeling is to make sure you do not bring very heavy memory-intensive columns. We used DMVs to find out the amount of memory that each column occupies in the model.
Here is a Power BI model which has the size of …
We can open it through Power BI Helper, and in the Modeling Advice tab, there is a new section that tells us how much space each column consumes:
It is clear that the columns Prefix and Sales ID in the above list are the most expensive columns. And obviously, this is because of the cardinality of that. If we remove this column (considering that it is not required in the model), then here is the result after saving the *.pbix file:
Wow! from 107 MB down to 11MB, saving of 90% memory size just with removing heavy, but unnecessary columns.
This very simple feature can give you an idea about expensive columns for the compression engine of Power BI, and then you can control the model based on that.
Update from the Application
Previous versions of Power BI Helper didn’t have the “check for updates” feature. And every time you had to keep an eye on the newer available version. We heard you! Now the application will check for updates, and if there are any updates available, it will let you know;
You have the option to decide to update the application or not.
Power BI Helper is a tool for the community, from the community. It is a free tool now, and it will remain as a free tool forever. We want it to help you with all Power BI development needs. So, if you have any ideas worth to add to the product, please don’t hesitate to let us know.
Reza is author of more than 14 books on Microsoft Business Intelligence, most of these books are published under Power BI category. Among these are books such as Power BI DAX Simplified, Pro Power BI Architecture, Power BI from Rookie to Rock Star, Power Query books series, Row-Level Security in Power BI and etc.
He is an International Speaker in Microsoft Ignite, Microsoft Business Applications Summit, Data Insight Summit, PASS Summit, SQL Saturday and SQL user groups. And He is a Microsoft Certified Trainer.
Reza’s passion is to help you find the best data solution, he is Data enthusiast.
His articles on different aspects of technologies, especially on MS BI, can be found on his blog: https://radacad.com/blog.